The good (Islam), the bad (Christianity) and the ugly (the BBC)

Old Holborn is on the warpath, having found, through Gates of Vienna, that the BBC is still up to its old linguistic sleight of hand, lauding Islam as a veritable fount of 'human rights' and denigrating Christianity as nothing worth thinking about really, apart from its being the cause of slavery and oppression. Or something..

Although the BBC has a reputation for bias, dishonesty and the promotion of cretinous infantile ideologies designed to destroy civilised society, they appear to have surpassed themselves in their attitude to Christianity and Islam on their GCSE Bitesize revision website which is so fantastically biased, so hatefully anti-Christian and so perversely pro-Islamic that when one considers it is aimed at the unformed minds of young school children it must surely be tantamount to child abuse. The BBC religious studies page, which can be found here has various sub-divisions, but for the purpose of this article I am going to concentrate on Prejudice & Discrimination and again, for the sake of this essay I will ignore Judaism, Hinduism and Sikhism, and centre only on the attitudes of Christianity and Islam. For those readers who do not wish to read this article in its entirety, then the four links in the paragraph above will take you to all the relevant pages, but be sure to do the Christian test as well as the Islam test at the end of each revision section. A word of caution however; if you suffer from high blood pressure or have a dicky ticker I would advise you to steer well clear.

Well, the BBC's got plenty of form in that regard.

The BBC has long stated as though it were fact: ‘The Koran was revealed...'

This contrasts starkly with the longstanding BBC position on Christianity: 'Christians believe that... Thus the BBC makes no comparable statement about the Christian 'revelation' being fact.

There is a lot more stuff about various kinds of wickedness in connection with Christianity, and lots of lovely warm stuff about justice and fairness in connection with Islam.

Now I don't mind the BBC saying, 'Christians believe...' in their lofty dispassionate, objective way. I merely ask that they use the same terms for describing Islam. It wouldn't take much effort to put 'Muslims believe that' in front of 'the Koran was revealed'. See what I did there?

But, by its choice of linguistic terms the BBC makes -- and broadcasts -- a value judgement of its own: that the basic tenet of Islam is true and historically verifiable in contrast with the inferior value of the equivalent basic tenet of Christianity which is not described as ‘fact’.

This is conveying an impression by omission - an old trick and a first year undergraduate deploying it in an essay would be asked to say whether it was sloppiness or intellectual dishonesty. The wholly rationalist position of the BBC treats fact as superior to mere unverifiable, subjective belief. It therefore follows, from its choice of language, that the BBC holds Islam to be superior to Christianity. Islam is, in the BBC’s terms, both literally true and (as it is described here) full of good things as against Christianity which is merely unverifiable opinion and (as described here) full of bad things. In short, ‘Islamic belief is based in fact, and good’ and ‘Christianity is based in nothing more than opinion, and bad’. Has anyone noted, by the way, that the newly appointed head of religious broadcasting is a Muslim? Not that this fact can possibly have any bearing of course. No Christian head of BBC religious broadcasting would be allowed to claim factual superiority for his own religion over Islam, so naturally no Muslim head of BBC religious broadcasting may be allowed to claim superiority for his faith over Christianity. Right? And how many times have we heard the DG say, recently, 'The BBC has no opinions'? But the BBC does have corporate opinions, and we are paying for the promulgation of these opinions which the BBC is forbidden by its Charter to hold. This habitual opposition of Islam to Christianity (an opposition proposed and persisted-in by the BBC, let us be clear) is pernicious. It is, however, but all of a piece and hardly less pernicious than the BBC's pushing its many other corporate opinions: on right wing opinion (bad) as opposed to left wing opinion ('centre'/'balanced'/good), climate science scepticism (bad), free market politics (bad), privatisation (bad), elite education (bad) except in sport (multicultural and non-academic, therefore good) and the teaching of our history and native culture (bad, bad, bad). Oh, the BBC has opinions, all right. And licence to promulgate them at your expense and to the exclusion of all opposing opinions using the most advanced and powerful communications methods ever developed.

As Randall says, they don't realise that it's bias. It's visceral. They cannot conceive of anything outside their group think being acceptable.

Most BBC employees live in multicultural city centres, overwhelmingly London, where half the population is not native English and probably comes from the developing world of which vast swathes are Muslim. They live in neighbourhoods where Islam is highly visible - and intends to be. The Christian majority is simply a native component of the wider environment and, having no peculiar costume or manners (because native) is largely invisible by comparison.

The BBC accepts wholeheartedly all the leftist dogmas on inclusivity. Indeed, it spends a lot of money training all its staff to think as Labour tells them to think.

Add to that their fear of more Islamist violence in the city where they live, if 'the religion of peace' is criticised in any way, and it's really not hard to see why the BBC promotes Islam as factual (which Muslims believe and insist upon) and superior to our native (spit) religion which most BBC employees have been taught to despise as the founding doctrine of hated imperialist oppressors in all parts of the world and at all times and especially in Britain, is it?

It really isn't.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. I think...